ABSTRACT
The 1990s saw the introduction of new economic policies by the Indian government to integrate the economy into global capitalism. In 2011 India emerged as a not so inconsequential global player in global capitalism. The 1990s also witnessed the collapse of the existing socialist states. In 1989, Francis Fukuyama and his supporters, a resident scholar at the RAND Corporation, Washington, DC, argued that Western liberal democracy and capitalism had won an irreversible victory over all their ideological competitors, most importantly over socialism. I state these bare but defining facts to emphasize the privileged position and interests of global capital and, therefore, of an increasingly transnational capitalist class. Indian capitalists themselves have been increasingly investing globally and form part of this transnational class. 1 Class matters even if working class movements appear to have been overtaken by a host of other social movements based on caste, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, and environment. Class matters because division of labour and division of property remain indivisible in contemporary capitalism. It is in this context that I argue that any analysis of social movements, even that of the New Social Movements (NSMs), which appear to break away from a class-centric perspective, has to therefore engage with class.
